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07.01.2024

What’s Behind America’s Loneliness Crisis?

Commonweal Magazine

Loneliness-production has been a big business for a very long time

American loneliness has, not for the first time, given birth to a bustling new industry. Last year, in a truly conversation-changing move, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an eighty-two-page warning about the dangers of this growing public-health crisis, which impacts both the mental and physical health of far too many Americans. In the wake of the report, there has been a surge of new nonprofit initiatives and tech startups targeting loneliness, as well as a lot of handwringing in the press.

The loneliness-amelioration industry, now in the boom segment of its life cycle, generally assumes that loneliness is a personal problem to be solved via low-cost hacks like saying hello to your neighbors, being nicer to your political opponents, putting down your smartphone, downloading a new app, or volunteering in your local community. Much of this is perfectly good advice, but none of it addresses, or even recognizes, the carefully constructed cultural and institutional architecture that produces American loneliness. Loneliness-production has been a big business for a very long time, and its profits are astronomical. The central question is whether Americans can carry out something akin to a mass revolt before this industry drains all the vitality out of the American project.

We should start with asking what loneliness actually is. In the dominant social-scientific framework of our day, loneliness is defined as a discrepancy between the social life one has and the social life one would like to have. This definition is widely employed because it makes room for the fact that one can be lonely in a house full of loving, caring family members, just as one can be not lonely on a solo hiking expedition. But this definition’s capaciousness comes at a cost. The dominant framework is so thin as to be of little use in understanding why any particular person or society is afflicted with loneliness, or what to do about it. This framework says that, for reasons that are largely unclear, we just happen to want something different than what we have. It implies that the solution is simply to try harder to get whatever it is we want.

But if this prevailing framework is inadequate, we still need to understand what it is that we all seem to want—or, rather, need—and how to get it. Since we know that the mere presence of others is not the opposite of loneliness, then what is? The truest answer, if not the most obvious, is that the opposite of loneliness is shared agency. When you and I value the same things, and pursue those things together, what might have been a competitive, zero-sum relationship becomes one of solidarity—of shared risk and reward, of mutual aid, even of loving care or shared identity. The human species has developed in contexts of shared agency, from families cooperating to find food and protect their young, to religious communities collectively pursuing holiness and good works, to tribes pursuing the directives of their local shaman via ceremony or warfare, even to criminal gangs cooperating to defeat their rivals. This tendency toward shared agency can be turned to either good or bad purposes, but it accounts for most of our success as a species and, when well directed, for much of what makes a flourishing life here and now.

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Cover image by Nigel Van Wieck, Q Train, 1990 (© 2024 Nigel Van Wieck, @nigelvanwieck/Licensed by AFNYLAW.com)